Podcast Episode 16: Sedation

Being able to calm and sedate patient in operational or prolonged field care situations may be a valuable skill. Here are our thoughts on sedating your patients when patient comfort and safety are an issue?

Glasgow Comma Scale

Get your GCS before sedating you patient so that you can track trends later during your sedation wake-ups/holidays.

If you are doing sedation it is highly recommended that you prepare by going through the MSMAID acronym detailed in a previous post and podcast. This will ensure you have the minimum equipment, drugs and personnel required for the job.

This is the same circle of awareness from last episode. Once you have your MSMAID plan for anesthesia you should monitor your patient and level of sedation using the circle of awareness ever 5 minutes until they have been off of anesthetic agents for an hour. Anytime you are giving drugs that can alter the patient’s respiration rate or hemodynamics you should have someone at the head of the patient monitoring the components of the circle of awareness. If you are using a push dose or bolus you should know how long the onset for the drug is and check the circle accordingly. It will keep you out of trouble.

The Richmond Agitation and Sedation Scale is a standard scale used to quantify a patient’s level of consciousness. Tracking a RASS is another way to trend a patients condition while sedated. Hang this, along with the GCS card, next to your patient bed in your aid station for easy reference.

3 thoughts on “Podcast Episode 16: Sedation”

No patient will ever be “alert and calm” (RASS of “0”)if given any amount of sedative? Because that’s about how I felt during a certain male procedure, when sedated on a couple milligrams of versed. Am I missing something?

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